49
WE STOPPED THE CAR at a service station along the highway. We got out to buy a big bottle of ginger ale and took the opportunity to call home. When mother answered we were silent until she started to cry. Then we cried too, and she listened. She always listens though she knows we’ll say nothing. Sometimes she laughs, out of pleasure we imagine, because she feels less alone. Then we hang up. It’s been twenty-nine years; we’d love to see her. But not father.
We paid the service station attendant to wash the windshield with that tool that collects everything but the last bit of foam. As his face appeared in a corner of the glass, he looked shamelessly inside, and we asked each other if we should make faces at him or direct our gaze toward the infinite. Later we rewrote my last poem, we added an attention grabber, “you remember,” which we didn’t know if we’d keep. We always do that, add something or remove something when we’re bored. Or we read a strange novel aloud, with a flashlight, as we drive through the night. And later we discuss over and over what it was all about.
This was the poem:
DOLLHOUSE
When I’m not looking he comes toward me, when I’m looking he stays over there, at a distance, watching me. If I could carry him alone into the silence without cracking my hands beneath the bark, between the bars, into the hole, open like a grave. And later we move away to a place where I’ve never been, opening myself in front of him, a telescope kept in an old shoebox, we see only a gray room without paintings or corners. It’s the dollhouse, you remember, out in the rain there live three bears who do not sleep because someone may be in one of their beds, who do not wake up because during the day they had to find honey, before it hardened, and they are tired.
52
IN THE AREA OF Navidad — Cardenal Caro Province in Region Six of the Liberator Bernardo O’Higgins — few locals have any desire to remember the summer of 1999. So, when questioned about the international event that took place in the neighboring town of Matanza, the residents look out to sea and murmur: Hmmm, yes, it was entertaining, there were so many gringos. I just did my thing, you know, I can’t ignore my work, especially these days, everything’s so hard. So I didn’t see much. Like I’ve got the time to be worrying about some tourists. But yeah, I think a friend of mine had something to do with it.
The first time I traveled to the area, during the final months of 1999, I was disappointed not to find physical traces of the Transensorial Beyond Seasons Celebration, which I’d learned about from a television news program — the only one — investigating the disappearance of the Vivar siblings, before the coverage disappeared as quickly as they had. I thought that in Navidad and Matanza I’d find a trail left by the organization, propaganda on the walls, who knows, maybe some building that was built specifically for the event that had later been donated to the community. I searched wasteland areas, abandoned fruit stands, and at the municipal dump without luck for the detritus that, according to what I read in the international press, this transnational organization often left behind: posters, wax replicas of Hollywood actors, chicken carcasses without heads or extremities, jars of oil and acrylic paint, digital TVs, hair, overalls, suntan lotion, empty bottles, seaweed, used rolls of film, T-shirts and visors, burnt oil, stickers, lights, fast food wrappers, blankets, containers, colored lights, mirrors, plugs for American voltage, rubber gloves, tablecloths, Taiwanese cuddly toys, costumes of seventeenth-century French aristocracy, magazines, preservatives, exercise machines, microphones and headphones, sheets, holographic recordings, bicycles, beef jerky, unicycles and tricycles, dry leaves, towels, Styrofoam, bins of Panamanian fruit and vegetables, computers with biological processors, large white shirts, novels from every age in eight different languages, syringes, rackets, clay, encyclopedias, balls for various sports, fossils, hovercrafts, soaps, shampoos, DVDs and CD-ROMs, fetuses, straps and belts, couches, tons of tofu, folding parchment screens, car parts, bags of chalk, dozens of Catholic and Protestant Bibles, copies of Enuma Elish, Korans, Angas, Vedic books, Popol Vuhs, Mormon books, Tanajas, books of the origin of the Sikhs, Mishnas, books of Chilam Balam, Tao Te Chings, Talmuds, Bhagavad Gitas, Dhammapadas, Confucionist books, Kijikis, Nihongis, Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead, Engishikis, Upanishads, books of Urantia, triptychs, eddas; kilos and kilos of sand.
I asked more than thirty locals what they remembered about the previous summer, and invariably they told me about their families or about the lack of opportunities in the province, and sent me to some neighbor who may have been involved in the event. Finally, at a service station, strategically located between the towns, the attendant — a man of forty-some years, who preferred not to make his identity public — told me that, although he wasn’t directly involved with the organization (as his friend had said), he’d gone to “the mobile party” four nights in a row, where he worked as an assistant to a Chilean-African musician who played “a peculiar instrument.” Or at least he thought the instrument was peculiar — he told me, later, sitting in the service station’s cafeteria — because the sound it made was so sharp that it made something move in the pit of his stomach, like being tickled. Except for the last time, because he was too furious, he said with a smile, anticipating my series of questions. The instrument in question was the theremin of the Congolese Patrice Dounn, the other identity of the man I prefer to call Boris Real.
53
I SPENT THREE afternoons in January of 2000 sitting in a plexiglas booth, just over three feet wide, at a gas station between Navidad and Matanza. Behind me, there was a list of prices written in marker across the transparent surface and, above my head, there were products with brand names I thought had disappeared in Chile: Hilton Lights, Survivor, Pacific, Colo-Colo, Jockey Club, Ari, Nevada, Balu, Control. It was the only place I could sit and wait for the service station attendant. Every now and then some cars would pass by on the highway. The man wore a yellow jumpsuit and spent his time humming unintelligible music, alternating his activities between the broom, the ticket counter, and the oily floor of the mechanic’s garage. At two in the afternoon, with a cheap book in his hand, he went to eat lunch in Navidad. The service station was left inexplicably vacant. At three the man came back, marked his time sheet and slid underneath a dusty Volvo that was parked in the garage. At one point, I thought I heard him snoring.